I downloaded Orbz 2.1 from Garage today. You get 60 minutes play time with the demo - brave, on their part. Can they convince me in an hour that I want to play their game? (I know of people who've played my game for days and not completed the demo).

But damn, I was hooked on Orbz after about 15 minutes. I played it right through until my time was up and I was just really enjoying myself. Those clever sods!

What is it in Orbz that makes it so fun? It's got lame graphics that could easily be done in J3D , and atrocious MIDI music. It doesn't even perform particularly brilliantly on my midrange laptop - I can see it regularly dropping below the magic 50fps.

But it's just... strangely addictive.

(Reading between the lines you can see that I'm impressed by Orbz, and I might just have to buy it)

So go on: let's analyze Orbz and break out its constituent parts and find out why I want to buy it.

I don't think the graphics or music are particularly bad. It's just the style of game that only calls for simple visuals. Much like Monkey Ball on the GameCube. I can't really imagine this game with any other style of graphics, except maybe some sort of cel shading (and that's a big maybe). The graphics are pleasant and don't get in the way, works for me.

As for why it works I think it's another case of "easy to pick up, hard to master". I don't even think the tutorial was necessary.

The physics and controls are geared to the objective. They could have just as easily made your ball roll all over the place on missed shots, they wisely saw that'd be bad. It also doesn't look like near terrain affects your shot. Like if you're near a ridge and you shoot your ball doesn't immediately bounces back off the ridge.

It's got a nice flow to it. You can often go from star to star to star and rake up a 10+ long streak which is nice and satisfying.

Red stars seemed placed just right. You can either just go for a long streak of yellow, take risky shots on far off reds, or find yellows that lead you to reds. Nice little touch of strategy.

Well I played it a while back and thought it was interesting and a nice proof of concept type of game for Torque, but I didn't really find it all that entertaining to the point where I would pay money for it. I did think that it was a cool distraction. I kinda felt that there wasn't a real compelling reason to keep playing - the reward at each level didn't keep me wanting more.

A friend of mine likes Orbz (full version) very much. Since I don't play it, I'll quote him. To his background: he plays computer games intensely on a high end machine and also play in a FPS clan for years now. This means two things. First, Garage games don't just address the category "family/woman who plays a game once a week". Second, also people who are used to play high end 3d graphic games (FPS) can like the simple 3d graphics of Orbz, if the game is good (which it is).

He says it's alway nice to play Orbz in the meantime. What he likes most: Orbz is nice to watch, easy and fast to play, and you always want to hit more (score) compared to the last match.He says that these factors remembered him to Tetris, a very simple but addictive game (which I played for years).

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